Johann Gottfried von Herder

Johann Gottfried von Herder is a figure of majestic dimensions in the history of philosophy, exerting a major, even decisive influence on many leading figures in the century that followed him (Hegel, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Mill, Goethe) and contributing to the development of several entire disciplines (philosophy of language, linguistics, hermeneutics, anthropology, Biblical scholarship). In sharp contrast to the philosophical style prevailing in Germany during the time he wrote, Herder’s thought is large and various and his writing often unsystematic, diffuse, and even seemingly improvisatory. The very title of the work excerpted here, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, suggests a nondogmatic provisionality entirely characteristic of Herder’s thinking.

A commitment to openness and exchange, a broad tolerance of imprecision, and a resistance to closure are apparent in his few comments on race, which occur in the middle of a spacious discussion of the history of humanity—the first section is entitled “Our Earth is a Star among Stars”—where Herder places human diversity in the context of natural diversity, with the entirety governed by a uniform system of laws dominated by principles of opposition and reconciliation. Herder argues that humanity should be divided into peoples rather than into distinct races because, as he puts it, “the whole of humankind is engaged in a continuing metamorphosis” such that “complexions run into each other.”

For Herder, human differences are attributable largely to the effects of climate and geography on an organism restricted by nature to a limited number of possible variations. Sections in Book Six of Outlines on the “organization” of various peoples precede more general reflections in Book Seven, which begins with a programmatic statement whose title states the argument: “Notwithstanding the Varieties of the human Form, there is but one and the same Species of Man throughout the Whole of our Earth.” Herder’s view of the primacy of peoples—ethnic groups living together—was cited in the early twentieth century by Franz Boas in his efforts to orient anthropology away from race.*

Herder’s book, considered the masterpiece of his mature years, drew the skeptical attention of his former professor Kant, who pointed out in a long review that with the kind of information about the peoples of the world then available, one might conclude anything at all about human diversity, and “the philosopher [whom Kant describes as “our ingenious and eloquent author”] is at liberty to choose whether he wishes to assume natural differences or to judge everything by the principle tout comme chez nous, with the result that all the systems he constructs on such unstable foundations must take on the appearance of ramshackle hypotheses.” For Herder, the concept of race itself was an hypothesis, and a useless one. “I see,” he said, “no reason for this appellation.” Instead, he proposed another kind of concept altogether (to which Kant took great exception) in the “genetic power,” the mysterious essence, “the Mother of all the Forms upon Earth,” on which climate and geography act to produce diversification.

A far more astringent and abstract—a more “categorical” and less “romantic”—thinker than Herder, Kant was irritated above all by what seemed to him his former student’s naturalism, which makes no allowance for, nor demands on, the human being as opposed to any other natural creature, and which could produce sentences such as “each human individual has the measure of his happiness within him.” For Kant, happiness was not the point of existence, which had a higher purpose toward which humans, possessed of reason, should strive. “Does the author really mean,” Kant demanded, “that, if the happy inhabitants of Tahiti, never visited by more civilized nations, were destined to live in their peaceful indolence for thousands of centuries, it would be possible to give a satisfactory answer to the question of why they should exist at all, and of whether it would not have been just as good if the island had been occupied by happy sheep and cattle as by happy human beings who merely enjoy themselves?”**

What seems to have provoked Kant to this attack on his former student was Herder’s acceptance of a certain shapelessness and even meaninglessness in human existence, which, in Herder’s account, had no higher end toward which it ought to tend. There is no “ought” in Herder, and so traveler’s narratives, which documented mere variation, the more astonishing the better, were entirely adequate as sources of information about human existence. To Kant, who was then in the process of developing a critical philosophy devoted to the proposition that the proper end of human existence was the realization of freedom, such accounts were merely reminders of an inertial tendency in human life, and therefore of the difficulty of the philosophical, intellectual, and moral task.

Herder may have been fortunate in his temperament, but he was not averse to controversy. The second volume of Outlines seems, in fact, to be a veiled response to Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784). Herder’s rejection of the “scale of Being” constitutes a direct rejoinder to those (e.g., Long) who would deploy such a concept to argue for the proximity or even the intermingling of Africans and primates. [On the “chain of being,” see Linnaeus, Kames, White, Jenyns, Cuvier.]. And in a general sense, Herder’s refusal of the concept of race placed a stone in the path of those who would argue for any essential differences within mankind that would justify assertions of racial superiority or inferiority.